Gang of 13 premiers bring spats to Halifax

HALIFAX Nothing pains a columnist more than writing about a premiers’ conference.

The only equivalent, for premiers, is the occasional obligation to chair one.

This year it’s Darrell Dexter’s turn to host his fellow premiers in Nova Scotia. And you can feel his pain.

Coming in from a rainstorm, he switches on the lights in his darkened office and invites me in to look out past the historic Legislature to the harbour below, where he was to convene the Gang of 13 in a sterile hotel meeting room Thursday.

He may be a showboat New Democrat on the hustings, but closeted with his counterparts he inclines toward nonpartisan consensus builder. Now Dexter is daunted by the challenge of keeping this conference on the rails and his counterparts in line: The two westernmost premiers are at each others’ throats. And Quebec’s premier is on an election footing, poised to place his foot on Ottawa’s throat.

Alberta’s Alison Redford wants a pipeline to the Pacific — no questions asked. B.C.’s Christy Clark is putting her foot down before letting the oil flow — demanding cash flow for her own province.

All these public spats threaten to overshadow, utterly, the quiet deliberations Dexter had envisioned in his stately province. Carefully laid plans to forge a common front on energy, and issue a nonthreatening request to meet Prime Minister Stephen Harper, are slipping through his fingers.

I ask how he plans to keep a lid on these incipient rivalries. The premier chortles, buying time, then takes a pass: “It makes no sense for me as the chair to get hauled into something that is between the two premiers,” he muses diplomatically.

There is no stopping them.

Clark isn’t purposely picking a fight with neighbouring Alberta. She is quite simply in a fight for her political life with an election looming — now boasting publicly of putting her own province’s interests ahead of any pan-Canadian considerations.

That’s what makes it so hard to get along with the other kids at the party, all of whom do much the same thing. One premier is always facing an election — this year it’s Quebec’s Jean Charest in precampaign mode; last year it was Ontario’s Dalton McGuinty.

Now, Charest is ready to kick Confederation in the shins so he can stand tall back home. It has been nearly a decade since Charest first rounded up his fellow premiers in Quebec City and persuaded this ad hoc group to rebrand itself as the Council of the Federation (COF) — a ponderous and imponderable annual gathering.

The idea was to show the provinces could get things done on their own, without federal meddling. For a Quebec federalist like Charest, it was the embodiment of his conflicted view of Confederation — a Canada of co-operating provinces, with Ottawa out of the room. Now, with Charest down in the polls and the Parti Québecois threatening to reclaim power, COF may be consigned to the dustbin of history by a new separatist government that has signalled its intention to disengage.

All these years later, would anyone notice if the premiers didn’t meet? Even as a group, they are feeling increasingly irrelevant: They want to bring Ottawa back into the picture by inviting — pressuring, even — Harper to hold a federal-provincial summit on the economy.

For now, the premiers have only themselves to kick around, and they are already at it: Redford’s putatively pan-Canadian Energy Strategy would be all things to all provinces, which is to say it would mean nothing to everyone — an empty document replete with platitudes running the gamut from dirty oilsands to clean hydro, wind and solar. Against the backdrop of the B.C.-Alberta pipeline battle, creative ambiguity can only go so far.

But good on Alberta for returning to an activist policy of engagement with the rest of Canada. McGuinty and Redford patched up past differences over dinner in Toronto this month, creating a sense of goodwill that Ontario can build on.

Here’s a place to start: The Canada Pension Plan makes up only a fraction of retirement income, at a time when private pension plans are atrophying. Under Redford’s predecessor, Alberta thwarted CPP reform. In return for backing her inchoate energy strategy, let’s see if McGuinty is able to engage her on pension reform.